Lviv Opinion

With all the new stadia built, and the qualifying stages concluded, the next piece of Euro 2012 news that football fans had been waiting for was the draw. On Friday 2 December in Kyiv, the fate of the last 16 teams was decided. After four years of preparation, having been awarded the honour of co-hosting the tournament with Poland back in April 2007, Ukrainians finally discovered which teams would be playing in their country, and which countries their national team would face in the group stage. And Leopolitans watched the draw with great interest to find out which matches would be hosted in their new crown jewel – Arena Lviv.

October saw the unveiling of 2 new Euro 2012 stadiums in Kyiv and Lviv, completing Ukraine’s set of four host city venues ahead of next summer’s showcase European Championships. The country is still far from ready for its role as Euro 2012 co-host, but nevertheless Ukraine’s achievement in meeting its stadium obligations more than half a year before the big kick-off is a symbolically potent success that hasconfounded the legions of doubters who consistently said that it couldn’t be done.

They say that the past is a different country, but in patchwork Ukraine the past is actually at least two different countries in a state of perpetual conflict. With the removal of the Soviet straightjacket, these opposing world views have resurfaced with a vengeance, producing an ongoing national identity crisis which has so far lasted two decades and counting.

Ukraine’s much-hyped European Champion¬ships debut is now just twelve months away and as the clock ticks down towards the big kick-off attention will remain firmly focused on the state of the country’s preparations. Will all the planned airports, stadiums and — most importantly from the perspective of UEFA bigwigs — five-star hotels be ready in time? Beyond the bricks and cement of raw infrastructure undertakings, Ukraine’s abil¬ity to successfully manage the tournament will also come under considerable scrutiny: do the country’s policemen and hospitality sector staff speak good enough English to interact with visiting fans? Are host city fan zone facilities up to scratch? Will relaxed local attitudes towards alcoholic excess lead to disaster as football fans from all over Europe rush to experience the dubious pleasures of Ukrainian horilka?

Lviv Today publisher Peter Dickinson assesses the damage being done to Ukraine’s international image by Chornobyl tourism trade. t is April again and so the traditional annual Chornobyl media frenzy is once more upon us. As this will be the 25th anniversary of the 1986 nuclear disaster, this year we are likely to see even more feature stories than usual popping up in the international press – doubly so given the additional editorial interest which has been generated in recent weeks by the ongoing crisis situation surrounding Japan’s nuclear power plants. Busloads of journalists are already en route to the Ukrainian capital and over the coming weeks they will make the pilgrimage to the exclusion zone north of Kyiv in order to experience the dubious thrill of exposure to the aftermath of Ukraine’s infamous nuclear disaster.

President Yanukovych came under fire recently for sexism following his colourful commentary at January’s Davos economic summit in praise of Ukraine’s ladies and their annual springtime street-level striptease. This was certainly not the sort of thing which one expects presidents to say when ad¬dressing high-level international business forums. But while many no doubt felt the Donbass strongman was being somewhat less than statesmanlike, few with first-hand experience of the country would accuse him of exaggerating. The Beatles were among the first in the modern era to identify this incred¬ible Ukrainka appeal, famously singing in the 1960s: “The Ukraine girls really knock me out. They leave the West behind.”

Austria has always been a key player in the affairs of Central and Eastern Europe, and so it was only natural that after the fall of the Iron Curtain Austrian businesses should be among those at the forefront as Europe’s market economies ventured into the formerly socialist lands of the Eastern Bloc. The forefathers of these 1990s economic pioneers had once ruled much of Eastern Europe as part of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, and it is no accident that even today there is a strong accent on former Habsburg domains within Austria’s international investment portfolio. This is equally true inside Ukraine itself, where Austrian activity has been both nationwide and with a regional bias in favour of the former Habsburg lands of West Ukraine, centring on Lviv itself – a city which many Austrian investors say reminds them of home.

Lviv Today publisher Peter Dickinson on the challenges facing Ukraine’s post-Orange generation of young patriots as they face up to the country’s new geopolitical direction
After five years of post-Orange press freedoms, an ill wind appears to be blowing through the country’s media sector. It took President Kuchma a decade in office before the nation’s journalists finally came out in protest against state censorship, but the new Yanukovych administration has provoked the same reaction within just three months. Journalists at a number of national channels threatened strike action in May in response to the selfcensorship
and biased news reportage which they claim has accompanied the arrival of the new government. Meanwhile,
commentators complain that the free-for-all of modern Ukrainian political debate has been replaced by a sanitized
version of events which bears an uncanny resemblance to the humourless coverage favoured by the Kremlin’s power vertical.

Lviv’s football team Karpaty (‘Carpathians’) are on the verge of qualifying for European football for the first time in a decade, offering the club’s fans the prospect of an all-too-rare European adventure. But will Lviv’s notoriously nationalistic fans prove good ambassadors for what was once seen as one of Eastern Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities?